The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England ed. by Jane Chance

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER mock-epic elements embedded, and they concern the possession and loss of a wife and chattel and inheritance. At a narrower level, as part of the Merchant's account, Tale and Prologue surely are, first of all, part of an analysis of the commercial culture of London and Italy, their historical and mythographicreferents moving in exceedingly complex directions of which the Edward III-Alice Perrers affair isperhaps one but not the most obvious. The authors rightly point to the force of Saturn as a planet in the tales, making it a metaphor for the force of events coming together to destroy England, but iconologically Saturn is also the god of the cycles of time, whatever they produce, and ofthe originalage of gold spoken of in Ovid; in Boethius, book 2, prose6; and in Chaucer'sFormerAge. In those poems of direct statement (which Butcher and Brown do not treat, one of them in Chaucer's own voice) the force of history does not destroy Eden. That is done by the misdirection of human will and a selfish human vision of how human communities should operate and the earth's resources be treated. The sinister historical effects that Chaucer's characters directly or implicitly attribute to Saturn and that Saturn himself claims may also be the product of human choice of how to appropriate Saturn's influence, especially if one looks beyond the rhetoric of self-rationalization employed by many of Chaucer's Saturnian characters. Butcher and Brown have struggled usefully with the Chaucerian text. Many of their detailed readings are excellent, as are some of their more general interpretations. To confirm or disconfirm their larger assertions about Chaucer's vision, we shall have to examine more carefully than we have so far the details of historical understanding in Chaucer's circle. We need to know the theories of historical reflection basic to late-fourteenth­ century English criticism, and more about the specific historical and social resonances of Chaucer's rich language. Butcher and Brown can give us help in developing that discussion. PAUL A. OLSON University of Nebraska, Lincoln JANE CHANCE, ed. The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France andEngland. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991. Pp. xi, 336. $34.95. Dedicated to Richard Hamilton Green, the essays in this rather loose­ jointed collection discuss appropriations of the Latin mythographic tradi104 REVIEWS tion by French and English vernacular writers from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. AfterJane Chance's introductory survey ofmedieval mythographic tradi­ tion, four essays center on French texts. Jeanne A. Nightingale, "From Mirror to Metamorphosis: Echoes of Ovid's Narcissus in Chretien's Bree et Emde," argues convincingly that Chretien modeled his treatment of the lovers on Ovid's Narcissus and Echo and that the borrowing is the focal point ofa synthesis ofcourtly and Neoplatonic figural schemes, a means of grafting Chretien's vernacular poem to the Latinate classical tradition. The other essays deal with late-medievaltexts in which mythography is adapted to explicitly Christian themes. William D. Reynolds, "Sources, Nature, and Influence ofthe Ovidius moralizatus ofPierre Bersuire," gives a useful account of the character and background of the work, though some of his reports of earlier mythographical works seem to be secondhand, and include the misleading suggestion that Fulgentius's Mitologiae and the Narrationes associated with the name ofLactantius Placidus are commen­ taries on the Metamorphoses. He ends with a sensible review of the evidence for Chaucer's use of Bersuire. Two largely descriptive essays on Christine de Pizan show chivalry mediating between Christian and pagan themes.Judith L. Kellogg, "Christine de Pizan as Chivalric Mythographer: L'Epistre Othea," shows how the Othea uses chivalry in an original way to link the pagan and Christian worlds and revitalize myth in a context of "universal history" (pp. 113-14), and how it foreshadows the concern of Christine's later work with the historical role of women. Margaret J. Ehrhart, "Christine de Pizan and theJudgment ofParis," links the growing importance of this legend for Christine to her passage from imitation of, first, Machaut's Fonteinne amoureuse and then the Ovide moralise to the creation ofher own...